27 Mar
2000
27 Mar
'00
4:26 p.m.
In <38E04821.4B8943AE(a)mainecoon.com>om>, on 03/28/00
at 01:26 AM, Chris Kennedy <chris(a)mainecoon.com> said:
Well, it must be working if it's booting from the
hard disk. I take it
from your description that you believe you've inserted the CDROM into the
chain between the controller and the hard drive. Is that correct? Beware
the fact that some earlier deskside Sparcs had Bad Weirdness with their
SCSI cabling, in that the internal controller spoke to internal drives
using an external cable...
Yes, the cdrom is in the 'middle'. This IS one of those wierd machines
that has an external cable running from the internal drive chain to the
internal controller....
Is this a Sun cdrom drive? Random SCSI cdrom drives
are prone to not
working unless they have a sun-specific hack to make the ID string they
return something identifiable to the boot prom. Differing Suns have
differing ways of refering to CDROM drives, and some insist that the
CDROM drive show up as ID 6. Have you tried using the prom diagnostics
to probe the bus to see who is home?
I figured the id6 thing out by inferring from other info I hit on the web
which was pretty slim on specifics. The drive is 6 and is a Toshiba
XM-3701b.
I think I'd sort out the hardware issues. Solaris
5.4 (2.4) is
incredibly old, slow, buggy and unsupported. You can get a single
machine license for Solaris 8 (nee 5.8 or 2.8, depending on which
numbering scheme you chose to use -- it's all the same thing) for the
cost of media and shipping; unlimited license is $75 as is the source
license. You're better off sorting out the hardware so you can install a
version of the OS that actually works, but failing that you could pry the
drive out and mount it on an x86 Solaris machine.
I may well just do that (mount the drive on my clone for cracking).
Another option I though of would be to install solaris X86 on my clone as
a boot server and install over the lan. I have the correct tranceiver (on
my Data General mv4000 right now).
Maybe I need a single-speed cdrom? BTW there are issues with this machine
I have not yet resolved such as a parity error on a simm and what I think
might be a power problem. I have cleaned and reassembled it but don't
have any 30pin 4mb simms handy this evening.
I have both the X86 free solaris 7 and the sparq version of same on cdrom.
--
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Jeffrey S. Worley
Technical Services
Bits & Bytes Computer Services Inc.
1979B Hendersonville Road
Asheville, NC 28803
828-684-8953 - voice 0900-1700 five days
828-687-9284 - 24hr fax
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Technoid(a)Cheta.net
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